Perplexity, in 50 million living rooms.
Perplexity wanted to bring their answer engine into the living room, on Samsung's 50-million-household Smart TV platform. A TV has no keyboard, no touchscreen, and a remote with about five useful buttons.
Typing a question with an on-screen keyboard and a d-pad takes forever — nobody does it twice. Every part of the experience had to work from ten feet away, navigated with up/down/left/right and a back button, on hardware with a fraction of a phone's processing power. And before any of it could ship, it had to pass Samsung's certification process: over 100 test cases, covering everything from memory limits to privilege declarations.
"We didn't adapt a phone app for the TV. We built for the ten-foot experience from day one."
We built a complete spatial focus-navigation system from scratch, before writing a single feature — every element on screen declares its neighbors up, down, left, and right, so the remote always moves where you'd expect. Voice comes in through the Samsung SmartThings app or a Bluetooth mic, feeds OpenAI's Realtime API for speech-to-text, and falls back to the keyboard cleanly if a microphone isn't available.
Answers stream in word by word rather than waiting for a full response — important on a screen ten feet away, where waiting reads as broken. The whole thing shipped in English, German, and Korean at launch, with the interface detecting the TV's system language automatically.
